Retail strategy: 3 quick tips for maximizing customer lifetime value.

Today’s era of inflation and tight budgets has many retailers flailing. Consumers are brand-switching to get the most out of their investment and avoid paying inflated prices, making brand loyalty a thing of the past.

To survive the downturn, brands need to rethink their retail strategy and focus on creating the best digital experiences in order to build lasting customer relationships.

The key? Maximizing every customer’s lifetime value. Let’s look at three ways retailers can increase customer satisfaction and keep them in the store.

Optimize for every touchpoint across the customer’s journey.

As the typical customer’s journey becomes more blended between online and live interactions, retailers must pay equal attention to each channel. Whether the customer is shopping on mobile, desktop, or at a brick-and-mortar store, every touchpoint along the customer journey counts.

According to our 2022 holiday data, the way consumers shop is changing: While desktop may have been the go-to channel for the majority of shoppers in the past, customers are now not only browsing on mobile but checking out on their phones, too, highlighting the importance of building an omnichannel experience.

For retailers, the time to catch the train and engage customers through a multi-channel journey is now, especially if they want to thrive in this era of inflation and tight budgets.

To improve your customer’s digital experience, leverage technology to explore your data and make sense of what it means.

Understand what matters to the customer.

Every customer coming to your store shops and behaves differently, with unique factors influencing their buying decision. That’s why understanding what matters to shoppers is one of the keys to building lasting customer relationships.

Consumers today have a lot of choices, and they seek out brands whose values align with theirs, making knowing the shopper’s preferences more important now than ever before. Keep a pulse on consumer behavior trends to learn how to best engage with your target customers.

For example, two big factors driving consumer spending are value, where customers get the most bang for their buck, and sustainable goods and services. As a retailer, you could offer higher rewards for shoppers that make sustainable purchases to show your commitment to the customer’s values and keep them coming back to the store.

Build a flexible retail strategy.

From supply chain issues to the rising costs of goods and services, predicting customers’ buying patterns has become a challenge for brands. Priced-out or out-of-stock items have pushed consumers to search for alternatives, and for retailers, that means they need to build a flexible and resilient strategy to prevent shoppers from going elsewhere.

Again, in order to do so, it’s important to understand your customer and what matters to them. Say an item become unavailable or inflates in price. To keep the customer from going to a competitor, you could suggest related products that more closely match the customer’s needs, provide regular updates on stock availability, or promise first access to new products, re-stocked products, or promotions.

By taking a flexible approach, you can ensure customers are still satisfied with their experience even when the items they’re after are unavailable or out of reach and, in turn, build loyalty.